head an Indian
red. To add to the effect of this awkward and discomposing dramatic
exhibition of embarrassment, she began to wipe her hands on her dress,
and sat silent.

"I understand," said the lawyer hastily. "No matter--the conditions WERE
fulfilled."

"No!" said Peg amazedly. "How could they be until he was dead?"

It was the lawyer's turn to color and grow embarrassed.

"He DID say something, and make some conditions," continued Peg, with a
certain firmness through her awkwardness; "but that's nobody's business
but mine and his'n. And it's no call o' yours or theirs."

"But, my dear Miss Moffat, if these very conditions were proofs of his
right mind, you surely would not object to make them known, if only to
enable you to put yourself in a condition to carry them out."

"But," said Peg cunningly, "s'pose you and the Court didn't think 'em
satisfactory? S'pose you thought 'em QUEER? Eh?"

With this helpless limitation on the part of the defence, the case came
to trial. Everybody remembers it,--how for six weeks it was the daily
food of Calaveras County; how for six weeks the intellectual and moral
and spiritual competency of Mr. James Byways to dispose of his property
was discussed with learned and formal obscurity in the court, and with
unlettered and independent prejudice by camp-fires and in bar-rooms. At
the end of that time, when it was logically established that at least
nine-tenths of the population of Calaveras were harmless lunatics, and
everybody else's reason seemed to totter on its throne, an exhausted
jury succumbed one day to the presence of Peg in the court-room. It was
not a prepossessing presence at any time; but the excitement, and an
injudicious attempt to ornament herself, brought her defects into a
glaring relief that was almost unreal. Every freckle on her face
stood out and asserted itself singly; her pale blue eyes, that gave no
indication of her force of character, were weak and wandering, or
stared blankly at the judge; her over-sized head, broad at the base,
terminating in the scantiest possible light-colored braid in the middle
of her narrow shoulders, was as hard and uninteresting as the wooden
spheres that topped the railing against which she sat.

The jury, who for six weeks had had her described to them by the
plaintiffs as an arch, wily enchantress, who had sapped the failing
reason of Jim Byways, revolted to a man. There was something so
appallingly gratuitous in her plain